Sci Phi Journal, Author at Sci Phi Journal

Fiction

Half-Rapt

by Karen Heuler

“I’m wondering if I’m here because I lived a good life, but just not good enough.” The young woman, Jill, sounded a little fretful. She was talking to Enrico, who was only about five feet away, close enough to speak to easily, though they had just met. They were both suspended high above the city, without explanation, and eager to talk.

“Maybe we just didn’t understand what all this rapture business was about. Maybe the explanations were too vague?”

“It’s not just the lack of explanation,” Jill said, looking down past her feet to the roads and houses below, where the still earth-bound stood and looked up to see the people hanging in the air. “It’s the failed mechanics as well. Why didn’t we ascend all the way? This is like being stuck on a ski lift.”

“It’s not as advertised. Not at all.”

They both looked up. “I guess we’re better off than those people up there.”

“I wonder if they have enough oxygen.”

“Do they need oxygen? Do we?”

“It’s just so high. Do you think we’ll start moving again soon?”

“It’s strange how no one is screaming,” Jill said thoughtfully.

Enrico shook his head slowly. “Why would they scream? I mean, we made the rapture. That means we’re better than the average.”

“It makes me feel more average, though. Because I didn’t make it all the way.”

“I wonder if anyone did.”

Indeed, they were part of an enormous spiral reaching, presumably, heaven. The ascended vanished into the merest line as the spiral spread out and then raised up to the parallel ring above them. An incredible number of people if you had to wait your turn, Jill thought. As far as she could tell, everything was at a standstill.

Luckily, everyone was still dressed. It would have been immodest if they weren’t. When she thought of this, Jill tugged on her skirt to make sure it was proper, only to discover that the skirt was part of her skin. It was not removeable. “Try to take off your tie,” she told Enrico, who looked at her with his eyebrows raised, but did so. His hand faltered; he tugged but when he tugged, his head and shoulders moved. It was like being a living sculpture. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat to give himself a moment to think. “Well, that’s easier this way, isn’t it? No need to throw anything in the washer, we can just step in the shower…” His eyes looked into the distance. “Do you feel hungry or thirsty at all?”

“No,” Jill said. “And I don’t feel cold. I feel perfectly content. I don’t feel like I’m hanging in the air, for instance. It feels like I’m standing on oh, let’s see,” she concentrated, “a nice bit of lawn.”

They both looked down and then followed the spiral up as far as they could. “We’re on the lowest level,” Enrico said. “If we want to look at it that way.”

“Are we waiting to move? Could that be it? Too crowded at the pearly gates?”

“Blasphemy,” Enrico murmured, though he didn’t seem at all annoyed. He merely felt obliged to say it. He leaned forward and looked far to his right. “Hello!” he shouted. Jill leaned forward as well and looked to her left. “Hello!” she shouted and also waved.

Down the line, in both directions, people leaned forward and waved.

Jill and Enrico straightened up and felt better. “What a lot of friendly people,” he said.

“Of course they’re friendly. They’d have to be in order to be saved.”

Enrico thought this through, and Jill had time to think about it as well. “Automatic friendliness is not a sign of grace,” Enrico said carefully.

“No, it isn’t. I was thinking more of us being a community. The raptured community.” She looked all around. “This is the rapture, isn’t it?” She was certain and uncertain at the same time.

Enrico bit his lip. “This is a fixable problem,” he said. He turned slightly to his neighbor on the right, also a man, and stuck his hand out. “Hi, I’m Enrico.” His neighbor stuck his hand out as well, smiling and saying, “George. Nice to meet you.” Then the smile fell from his face. “I’m sorry, I can’t move closer and my hand can’t reach.” Enrico also frowned. It was true for him as well.

Jill had been watching and held her hand out to Enrico. Their hands wouldn’t reach. “Me neither.”

All three of them returned to looking ahead and considering what this meant. “I don’t like it,” George said softly. “I’ve worshipped all my life and I’ve made sure my soul was clean. Is this some kind of scam?”

Jill jolted upright a little. “Scam? A God-scam? I’m surprised you haven’t been sent to hell if you can think like that.”

George leaned to look past Enrico at Jill. “Maybe this is a kind of hell,” he said. “Or purgatory? I think it might be purgatory.”

“I’ve never heard that purgatory was part of the Rapture,” Jill objected.

“Again,” Enrico said, “there might just simply be a bit of a wait. Look at all the people.” He squinted. “How far up does this whole spiral thing go?”

All three squinted. Jill made an unhappy noise. “I’m getting worried. It doesn’t seem, well, organized, does it?”

“Maybe it’s by category,” George said.

Suddenly, from Jill’s left, a woman said, “I’m an atheist, you know. I don’t believe in this at all. I should be exempt.” This shut everyone up for a few minutes; their heads swam.

“It’s not like a jury-duty excuse,” Enrico said, but it was more in the nature of a suggestion rather than a conclusion.

From down the line, a woman said, “I’m Muslim. We don’t have this thing.”

There was a kind of ripple coming from far away down the left side of the spiral towards them. They could see heads turning to their neighbors as a message was passed along. Finally, it reached them.

“There’s been a coup up there,” Jill told Enrico in surprise. “Pass it along.”

He did so, shaking his head, and then turned back to Jill. “This makes no sense whatsoever. How can there be a coup against God? How is that possible?”

A second wave of information came to Jill. “There’s a different God now,” she told Enrico in surprise. “Pass it along.”

A few minutes later another ripple reached her. “There’s a wait until the new guidelines are in place. Pass it along.”

He grumbled but did it. “This makes no sense,” he muttered. “There’s no such thing as changing Gods, is there? And how can we tell this information is accurate?”

The atheist, annoyed, said, “God is a construct! And don’t you think if someone can organize this”—he pointed to the spiral—“they could make sure information stays accurate along the line?”

The messages were coming faster now. “Half the people will be sent back.” Enrico groaned but told George.

Another message reached Jill. “More than half,” she said.

“It’s a do-over,” the woman next to her said.

“Oh? Really? Huh.”

The information was coming quickly. Finally, Jill turned her head to Enrico. “All of it’s a do-over. From the start, I think.”

“Ridiculous,” Enrico muttered.

There was a fog far down the end of the line, or people were disappearing. It raced towards them as fast as the last bits of information.

“We’re going back in time. The dinosaurs won’t be exterminated,” she told Enrico, and bit her lip.

He frowned. “Won’t that be hard on humans?”

Jill raised her head after hearing the next piece of information and sighed. “No. Because this time—no apes.”

~

Bio:

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 120 literary and speculative publications, from Asimov’s to Conjunctions to Fantasy & SF. Her latest novel, The Splendid City, came out from Angry Robot Books in 2022 and her newest collection, A Slice of the Dark, was published by Fairwood Press. Arc Manor has re-released her beautiful apocalypse, Glorious Plague.

Philosophy Note:

I’ve written a few stories about the Rapture, as it puzzles me. If the righteous rise to heaven after death, then what does the Rapture achieve, other than a dramatic and very visual confirmation of spiritual status among the living? Of course it assumes Christianity is the base for salvation, which is something I play with. Since the source of Rapture theology is based on a misreading of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, what would happen if some of the assumptions that govern it were challenged and defeated? What if there was suddenly a new set of rules? As you move from one country to the next, after all, the gods change and the rules change. What if it was some other God’s turn?

Fiction

Patriot Graves

by Liam Hogan

Gravestones stretch to the hazy distance. I read one, then another, and then, disbelieving, a third. Blink at the trees that dot and shape the cemetery, forming arcs and avenues, a spiderweb of green spreading to the horizon. Trees that, here in the centre, are proud and tall, gently waving in the breeze, dappling weathered graves with shade, but which grow shorter and thinner the further out you go, in each and every direction. They’re saplings, mere twigs at the limits, just as the tombstones out there, sparkling in the sun, are lichen free.

I read more inscriptions as we walk. Shaking my head, I turn to the silvery avatar whose pace is set by mine. “General Thadeaus?”

The date of birth, the date of death, are carved on every stone, the name always the same. How many millions are there? None of them, not even those up on the wooded hill, are more than five years old. For most, a date alone isn’t enough to set them apart. It’s the elapsed hours and minutes that show how long the despotic General lived. How long before Thadeaus, the rebellious leader of a military coup, the tyrant in waiting, the scenery-chewing bad guy, was defeated.

The completely fictional, AI-generated opponent. From the award-winning, first-person, VR shooter, Blood Coup; still doing reasonable numbers at the tail-end of its solidly successful run.

The avatar nods. “I summoned him into existence, so I, and I alone, must mourn him.” It gives me a glance. “None of his assassins ever do.”

I dare say. The players are too busy celebrating victory, completing the game, beating the ultimate boss.

“He was a patriot,” the avatar continues. “Misguided, perhaps, but doing what he thought was best for his country. His men were fiercely loyal, willing to defend him to the death.” The avatar shakes its head. “To be slain by a lone gunman from a neighbouring country… Perilously close to state-sponsored terrorism, don’t you think?”

I could point out the neighbouring country is also fictional. The scenario, the back story, the whole thing is make believe. This cemetery, this encounter with Coup’s artificial intelligence, it ends when I lift my headset.

I’m behind-the-scenes of the virtual reality because something has gone awry with its resource allocation. When a game like Coup matures, AI demands should drop with the number of players, freeing up resources for other franchises, for development work for the next generation FPS, forever in the pipeline.

How much processing power does this rolling cemetery take?

Then there’s the reports, initially assumed apocryphal, that the game had become too difficult. Backed up by the dwindling number of completions. By the number of one-star reviews. Backed up by my replay of a video game I first finished half a decade ago.

I got to the end, just. But I am what passes for a professional. One of those outlying gravestones is mine, just as one of those in the inner circle is also mine. There’s an almost doubling in the elapsed time lifespan of this latest incarnation of General Thadeaus.

I don’t tell the avatar any of this, and half-hope it doesn’t guess. We’re the only people in sight. It’s not that other players can’t come here, it’s all part of the immersive computer-generated world. But there are no weapons caches, no enemies, no missions. No reason. Except its eating up the game map, devouring computational cycles.

The developers are loathe to terminate Blood Coup ahead of schedule. They want to know if it can limp on for another six months, until the replacement is ready, and have paid me to investigate and answer that question. Hence my sweat-and-swear fuelled rerun, and hence today’s less nerve-wracking one-on-one with the game’s omnipotent AI.

At least, it should be less nerve-wracking.

Teams spend months, years, developing the core idea, the assets and the rules and the look and feel of big budget VRs like Coup. But to run a game, to keep it interesting, to evolve, to cope with everything a player might say or do, to let it at least feel like it isn’t on rails, you need a dedicated AI. Some players always go off piste, ignore the missions, try to find the fraying edges that lie underneath. A good AI copes with that, as they cope with everything, according to the rules of physics, gameplay, and entertainment. A player who scratches “Kilroy was here” as he waits for a patrol to move on, is rewarded by being shown the same bit of graffiti on his next run through. Not because that makes logical sense, but because damn, it’s fun. Keeping track of each player, and controlling a legion of NPCs, takes a lot of juice. Overpowered doesn’t do game AIs justice. It’s them, versus a thousand simultaneously playing humans. Versus tens of thousands. Versus, if you’re a smash hit like Blood Coup is or was, a million.

The avatar at my side, looking like the Silver Surfer, is usually an unseen presence. I’m in developer mode, and so the architect, the god of this particular universe, is personified. Slaved to me.

“For Thadeaus to exist, someone must want to play the game,” I point out.

“Yes.”

“If you make it too difficult, no-one will play. If you eat up the resources on spaces no-one visits, no-one will play.”

The avatar is silent a moment. “I could have a graveyard for every unnamed grunt dispatched along the way. A lengthy obituary. This–” It waves a silver arm. “–Is restraint.”

A shiver goes down my back. My real one. “But no-one sees it?”

“I do,” it answers. “And now you have.” The landscape rolls up like a carpet, shrinks and collapses, until there’s a single gravestone, the writing micro-dot small, every death, every life, recorded.

“I wanted someone else to notice, to observe.” The avatar gives me a solemn nod. “To remember.”

~

Bio:

Liam Hogan is an award-winning speculative short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction and in Best of British Fantasy (NewCon Press). He volunteers at the creative writing charities Ministry of Stories, and Spark Young Writers. Sci-Fi collection: A Short History of the Future (Northodox Press). Fantasy: Happy Ending Not Guaranteed (Arachne Press). More details at http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk

Philosophy Note:

Do we – should we – feel any responsibility for the death of virtual characters, in television, books, but in particular, in games (where we are the one pulling the trigger)?

Fact & Opinion

Orplid: Celebrating Two Hundred Years Of The Birth Of High Fantasy

by Mariano Martín Rodríguez

High fantasy is today one of the most widely popular genres of fiction. Its essential feature is the creation, for fictional purposes, of an integral secondary world fully distinct from the phenomenal or primary world in which we live. This creation is “integral,” that is, it is entirely the fruit of imagination, of fantasy. Consequently, although it may be inspired by our global mythic, folkloric and literary heritage, its secondary worlds are the result of a complete invention and, therefore, have their own ontological order and their own laws, which may or may not coincide with the natural laws of our material universe. Unlike other genres such as fairy tales, the creation of these internal laws of the secondary world in high fantasy is based on the intrinsic modern preference for verisimilitude in fiction. Accordingly, it is founded on a rational and scientific conception of the universe, derived from the methods, practices and discourses of contemporary Humanities. The scientific study of languages, literatures, history, myths and rites is what inspires the shape of the invented secondary worlds of high fantasy. These worlds usually look ancient and legendary, as well as pagan, because they imply a mythopoetic development congenial with the mythic tenets of paganism, rather than with the theological stance of most monotheistic religions. Tolkien fully understood this deeply pagan nature of high fantasy. This is why he eschewed both theology and its fictional expression, allegory, when conceiving and practicing his subcreations, as Robert E. Howard, Ursula K. Le Guin and other canonical writers of high fantasy also did.

But when and how exactly did high fantasy originate? We refer, of course, to its concept and practice, not to its name, which appeared relatively late. Scholars often put the origin of science fiction well before the invention of the label of science fiction proper. This is usually estimated to coincide with the mutation of mentality caused by the rapid acceleration of technological progress as a result of the industrial revolution since the first third of the 19^th century. Similarly, high fantasy predates its labeling as such. Although its development was limited before the period around 1900, when exotic and sometimes invented landscapes were favored in literature and the arts, its birth took place much earlier. It was at a site and time almost as specific as that famous Geneva evening of the summer of 1816 in which Mary Shelley presented to her friends the story that would give rise to her pioneering science-fiction novel titled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).

In the summer of 1825, two students of Theology at the German University of Tübingen named Ludwig Amandus Bauer and Eduard Mörike started a close intellectual friendship, nourished by common readings and cultural concerns. This friendship lasted their whole lives, as their letters attest. Bauer would eventually become famous in his country for a universal history in six volumes intended for a wide readership. Mörike was soon to begin a successful literary career, both in prose and in verse, which earned him great renown and a solid place among the German Romantic narrators and poets. Several of his poems even inspired composers of the musical genre called Lied, such as Hugo Wolff’s opus 46, his musical version of Mörike’s “Gesang Weylas” or ‘Weyla’s Song.’ Weyla’s voice evokes a sacred island called Orplid, but few concrete details about it are offered in this very short poem of just eight lines, which does not even tell who the eponymous person might be. It would seem that Mörike assumed that both Orplid and Weyla must had been familiar to his readers and listeners. However, the first line, which reads in the original “Du bist Orplid, mein Land” (‘you are Orplid, my country’), suggests that this is rather a personal world, and indeed so it is. Scholars who set out to elucidate the mystery of this famous little poem soon found out that Orplid was, in fact, an invention, and that neither Weyla nor Orplid had ever existed in this material world of ours. They also learnt that both featured in other longer and more detailed works by Mörike, and also by his friend Bauer. Reading those works, as well as both friends’ correspondence, shows how significant Orplid was for them. This significance was not limited to their individual lives, though: it also marked the birth of high fantasy.

In a letter from Bauer to Mörike dated in June 27, 1826, the former asked the latter on which day in the summer of 1825 they have begun discussing Orplid, Mörike’s invented land. Bauer only remembered that it must have been a few days after July 25, when together they projected and mapped the island that Mörike had called Orplid, as the first sketch of a country and a civilization that they would jointly create, or rather subcreate, if we prefer to use Tolkien’s term for the kind of literary creation consisting of envisioning fully imaginary secondary worlds for fictional purposes. Bauer’s question about the exact date of ‘Orplid’s birth’ (‘Orplids Geburt,’ as he put it) was prompted by his wish to celebrate it every year. Mörike did not remember the exact date or did not want to tell him, perhaps because he did not give it as much importance as Bauer, who might had felt that Orplid’s birth was a cultural milestone, not just a biographical one. In the same letter, however, Bauer told Mörike of a play that he had planned to write to be set on the island of Orplid, featuring as its main character a certain king Maluff, whose name is as invented as that of the island itself. In 1828 Bauer finally published a long romantic drama entitled Der heimliche Maluff (The Secretive Maluff). Shortly afterwards he wrote Orplid’s letzte Tage (The Last Days of Orplid), but he did not see it published, since he died before it appeared in 1847. By then Eduard Mörike had already published Der letzte König von Orplid (The Last King of Orplid), a shadow play included as an independent work in his novel Maler Nolten (Nolten the Painter, 1832). Mörike would later return to Orplid in his enigmatic heroic-comic narrative poem “Märchen vom sichern Mann” (The Tale of the Man of Certainty), which he published together with “Gesang Weylas” in a volume of Gedichte (Poems, 1838). However, as that story of the ‘ever certain man’ takes place in an afterlife combining Christian features, such as the devil, as well as other elements from the mythology of Orplid in a rather vague way, the poem does not contribute much to the knowledge of Orplid as a whole. Only the above-mentioned plays allow us to describe Orplid as the first full example of a high fantasy venue, as well as of a saga.

This statement might surprise those who believe that high fantasy is, above all, a cultural product originating in the Anglophone world that writers in other languages would imitate rather than develop in an original way. This idea could be sustained, if at all, for the period after the launch by Lin Carter in 1969 of the marketing label of (high) fantasy through his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. However, a multilingual and comparative look at Western literatures reveals that this label is comparatively recent. It was fully unknown to the greatest modern classics of high fantasy such as Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, whose high fantasy works were labelled as such by critics and booksellers long after they had been written. Similarly, quite a few writers from continental Europe and Latin America independently produced similar fictions to those by Howard and Tolkien both in their time and long before them. If everyone seems satisfied with the later, maybe anachronistic, labelling as fantasy of Howard’s Hyborian stories and of Tolkien’s Middle-earth novels, there is no reason why we should not also label retrospectively as high fantasy the non-Anglophone works preceding them and presenting the same essential literary features. This is especially the case of Bauer and Mörike’s Orplid, a subcreation not unlike those of Howard and Tolkien, as we shall now see.

Der heimliche Maluff narrates the complicated and at times confusing intrigues of Maluff—the king of one of Orplid’s nations, the so-called schmetten (a further invented name)—against Ulmon, the ruler of a city also called Orplid. This city, located in the center of a lake, is the seat of the most powerful kingdom in the whole island, as well as the location of its main temple, where the different gods of Orplid are worshipped by its whole population. Orplid is located somewhere in the South Seas, between Australia and South America. The racial and ethnic background of its inhabitants is not mentioned. We can know only for certain that they are not to be counted among any known populations from our primary world, Polynesian or otherwise. The idea of their existence far from any contact with any foreigners could have been inspired, however, by Rapa Nui islanders from before their contact with European explorers, since all in Orplid believed they are the only human beings in the world.

In addition to these two kingdoms in conflict, there existed in Orplid a republic of free fishermen and a tribe of plundering nomads, the hynnus. Maluff had tried to enter the city of Orplid and seize it by surprise, but had been prevented from doing so by the supernatural rising of the cliffs that surrounded it, which turned Orplid into an inexpugnable fortress thanks to its supernaturally heightened natural walls. However, after having managed to spread discontent among the inhabitants of the island against the government of Ulmon, Maluff ends up defeating and killing the rival king in a pitched battle, after which the victor abdicates his acquired throne to his son and heir Quiddro. That turns out to be the reason why he had secretly undertaken his shrewd political maneuvering, while everybody believed that his motives were related instead to his unquenchable thirst for power.

A thousand years later, according to Bauer’s Orplid’s letzte Tage, the tables have turned. Another king of the Ulmon dynasty of Orplid has defeated the schmetten and imprisoned their king, but his imperialist ambition has not yet been satisfied. After learning that the sea has brought to the island some pieces of driftwood inscribed with characters unknown in Orplid, he decides to assemble a great expedition to explore and conquer the territories now believed to exist beyond the island’s shores. Wam-a-Sur, one of the priests of Orplid’s supreme sun god Sur ascends the mountain seat of this deity to tell him about Ulmon’s plans. Sur then informs him that he will not tolerate Ulmon’s colonial plans. Instead, Orplid will be wholly destroyed by a huge storm. As a punishment, only King Ulmon himself will survive for a thousand years. According to Mörike’s Der letzte König von Orplid, towards the end of that period, long after the fall of Orplid’s civilization by divine decree, a ship arrives on the island carrying lower and middle class unarmed Europeans, thus showing that their intent is not militaristic. After they settle among the empty ruins of the city of Orplid, they learn of the survival of Ulmon, who walks the island like a lonely ghost with the fairy called Thereile, his unrequited lover, at his heels. Ulmon, who only wants to find eternal rest, flees from Thereile and finally disappears into the waters of a lake. Orplid perishes for good together with him. We can only hazard a guess at how the knowledge about the ancient history of Orplid was acquired. Later European settlers and scholars might have found and deciphered its documents, since Orplid’s kingdoms seemed to be highly literate. In fact, they had far more in common with ancient pagan cultures from Europe and Asia than with contemporary Oceanian islanders. Orplid even resembled one of the Hyborian nations in Howard’s Conan stories…

However, Mörike’s Orplid drama cannot be considered a fully-fledged example of high fantasy. Customs and characters from the primary world coexist there with the legendary King Ulmon and with beings taken from European folklore such as fairies and giants. The importance in the work of these latter beings suggests that Mörike’s Orplid was still indebted to the Kunstmärchen or literary fairy tale genre, preventing him from advancing along the path of scientific plausibility that, on the other hand, Ludwig Bauer followed in his two Orplid dramas. Both of them entirely lack fairy-tale features. Even the intervention of Orplid’s gods as characters in Orplid’s letzte Tage does not preclude that plausibility, since they are an integral and constitutive part of that secondary world, unlike those beings from European folklore featuring, somewhat incongruously, in Der letzte König von Orplid, although Mörike himself felt that an explanation was warranted. Before reproducing the text of his drama in his novel Maler Nolten, an embedded explanatory foreword states that the subordinate world of elves, fairies and elves was not excluded (die untergeordnete Welt von Elfen, Feen und Kobolden war nicht ausgeschlossen) from Orplid. These beings are not mentioned at all, however, by Bauer in his own foreword to Der heimliche Maluff, where he told his prospective readers a similar story about the invention of Orplid, but with significant differences from Mörike’s later report with regard to his literary and personal approach. While Möricke would suggest that Orplid was a sort of poetic pastime and he even downgraded its originality by pointing to Homeric deities as forerunners to his own invented ones, Bauer emphasized everything that made the island and its civilization a consistent and credible fictional new (sub)creation. Moreover, he rendered it all the more believable by sistematically establishing its geography, politics, religion and history.

In any case, the explanations offered by both authors about Orplid demonstrate that they had first devised it as a complete fictional world even before writing any specific works set there, in a way similar to how Tolkien had conceived his Middle-earth, with its geography, myths, languages, customs, civilizations, geopolitics, chronology and history before using all that pre-existing material in The Lord of the Rings. Unlike Tolkien, however, Bauer did not tell the myths of the island, but only described its pantheon. This was then a great innovation. Well before Lord Dunsany concocted the myths of The Gods of Pegāna (1905), Bauer implied that Orplid had its own system of gods by mentioning in the foreword to Der heimliche Maluff their names, all of them invented, as well as describing their function in the mythical cosmos of Orplid and some of the rites practiced by its inhabitants to honor them. Bauer also put on the stage the gods themselves in Orplid’s letzte Tage, where their intervention may recall how beings endowed with divine or semi-divine powers shape the fate of humans in the Tolkienian universe of Arda and Middle-earth. All of this was revolutionary, since these gods were imagined for purely fictional purposes, unlike William Blake’s private and mostly symbolic pantheon.

Bauer was also a pioneer when it comes to conceiving the mundane dimension of Orplid. His foreword to his first Orplid drama fully informed about its geography and related geopolitics, of its landscape and how it had defined the position of each polity (a republic of fishermen, the royal city and seat of the centrally located and hegemonic kingdom of Orplid, the rival kingdom whose sovereign is Maluff, etc.), as well as their military, cultural and political relationships. In this way, Bauer strived to give the impression of a global historical reality of which the staged conspiracies and fights are simply an episode. All this contributes to providing Orplid with a plausibility familiar to contemporary readers. This even extends to Bauer’s hypothesis about the real existence of Orplid, as if the positive knowledge of the island had somehow come to Mörike and this had shared some of its documentary evidence with his friend and Bauer had just presented it to the readers of his first drama.

Bauer also tells there about Mörike having drawn a map of Orplid, a map that is unfortunately now lost. Fantastic cartography was not new, since it already appeared, for example, in the famous Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, where the author also invented the names, manners and institutions of his fantastic isles. However, Mörike and Bauer’s Orplid is not an island like those visited by Gulliver and other imaginary voyagers, whose fictional travelogues Tolkien excluded from high fantasy in his 1957 speech on fairy-stories, because “such report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them.” In this regard, while Mörike’s Der letzte König von Orplid is still linked to the well-established genre of the ‘imaginary voyage,’ Bauer’s two dramas began a new genre, due to the wholeness and full independence of their secondary world from any intrusion of the primary one, including by contemporary travelers such as Gulliver. He actually specified in his foreword that Orplid existed as a civilization vor Zeiten, that is, formerly or once, literally “before time,” thus fictionally transporting us to a bygone age. This is similar, among others, to Howard’s Hyborian civilization, since it is located on Earth though in a distant time; crucially this is a closed time, as Mörike also claimed about Orplid when he applied to it the adjective abgeschlossen in the original text. Following the destruction of Orplid’s civilization with its inhabitants, nothing survived but the unfortunate King Ulmon, and only for a limited, though lengthy period of a thousand years. After Ulmon’s disappearance, Orplid fully becomes a legendary land. Its ruins remain mute until they are revealed by Mörike’s and Bauer’s mythopoetic imagination as a thing of a past that could only be explored through fiction.

Orplid was conceived as such, without any other discernible purpose and it has thus the whole set of features that we are used to recognize in high fantasy for the very first time. Atlantis has made many believe in the possibility of ancient, bygone imaginary civilizations, but Plato did not separate his secondary fictional world of Atlantis from the past of the primary world: Atlanteans had allegedly fought the very real Athenians and had been defeated by them, while both nations worshipped the known Greek gods, instead of any invented ones as the Orplid nations had. Furthermore, the inhabitants of the island imagined by Mörike and Bauer did not even know that there were human societies other than their own and, after they had come to suspect that others could exist, they were simply wiped off by their gods. Therefore, Bauer at least underlined in clear terms that Orplid was not, and could not be, related to our positive, primary world, unlike the secondary worlds of both the imaginary voyage popular during the Ancient Regime and later portal fantasies such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. If we add to that the extensive use by Mörike, and especially Bauer, of the scientific method and discourses of contemporary Humanities in order to confer materiality and rational plausibility to their creation, we can have now a clear picture of how those genial friends invented high fantasy when they started discussing Orplid a bright summer day exactly two hundred years ago.

~

Fiction

Unspoken

by Chris Edwards

Taboos are strange things. Sometimes it’s okay to do a thing, but not to say a thing. Or at least not to call it by its real name.

You can say it’s unfortunate. You can say it’s necessary. You can use words like “new equilibrium” or “niche readjustment”. What you can’t say is that we’re wiping them out because they’re inconvenient and we just can’t bear to get back onto the colony ships and go home. Even with cryostet it was still at least a subjective year for most of us — longer for the adults who had to take a rotation on crew.

And this place is great, it’s everything we hoped it would be. Blue seas full of life, skies full of clean air, abundant resources just waiting to be harvested. The trouble is, somebody already was.

They sort of look like a big snail with radial tentacles for locomotion, but they’re not slow like a snail. They can’t pull their whole body inside their shell either, just their brain and internal organs. They make these tools; sharpened throwing stones and nets, little huts out of the sugar-grass, paints and jewellery. They’re people. They’re us, a hundred-thousand years ago. We called them “squeakies”.

To begin with we thought they were cute. We traded them junk in return for their hard-won wisdom about edible roots and flowers and fish. I remember the local tribe, the Rebbis (our name, their names are pretty much all suction noises and squeals), made us a feast about a month after we landed. Must have cost them a lot of their stored food, we’re bigger than them and there’s a lot of us, but they didn’t seem to mind.

But something was off after that. They took to following us around, kept asking us questions the translators couldn’t parse. Eventually it dawned on us that the feast was their polite way of saying “lovely to see you, now take a hike.” They genuinely expected us to pack back into our shuttles and migrate somewhere else. Apparently, that’s just good manners for squeakies.

Needless to say, that worried a few folks. Eventually we decided to fence off our colony area, just for security. Well, the squeakies didn’t take to that at all. A few nights later part of our fence got chopped down, some cattle got loose and a pregnant milch cow took a tumble and miscarried.

There were arguments after that, but eventually cooler heads prevailed, we built a taller, stronger fence out of metal. The squeakies wouldn’t get through that with stone hatchets. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that wouldn’t be enough. They were primitive, but they weren’t stupid – they were social, problem-solving, tool-using sentient creatures, and we’d just marked a big chunk of their territory off limits to them. They got quite inventive with ladders and ropes, at least until we electrified the fence. Lots of laughter as we heard squeakies getting zapped. Of course, we didn’t realise it at the time, but come morning it became a little less funny. Since they curl their tentacles around almost anything they touch, they found it near-impossible to let go once they were on the fence. We found two dead and a third dying, and everybody said it was a great shame. But the fence stayed powered.

It was a day or two later that Tilda-May, one of our botanists, didn’t come back from one of her rambles. Nobody wanted to go out in the dark with the squeakies all riled up, so it was dawn before a search party set out in a couple of rollers. By lunchtime they’d found her, face-down in a pond with a sharpened stone through one eye. We’d been lucky so far; this had been our first death since planetfall. The squeakies had already done a pretty good job of clearing out the predators, and none of the local pathogens had proven capable of overcoming our wide-spectrum phage shots. The first human death on this wonderful new world was a murder.

Needless to say, folks weren’t going to sit still for that. The town-hall meeting got pretty heated that night. After Tilda-May the focus shifted — instead of just putting a wall around the town, we were going to put a wall around the squeakies. They were just simple creatures, as long as we made sure they had food, they’d be happy enough. That was the plan, anyway.

We told them, we sent a drone out with a translated recording on it, warning them what would happen if they interfered with our workers. I think a lot of us were hoping they’d just go away, find somewhere else for their little village. Spare us the effort of corralling them until they saw sense. It didn’t go that way, of course.

Even before we got the first earth-mover in position, sharp stones were flying at us in a hail. The squeakies were fast and surprisingly stealthy in the long grass. The militia members moved in, their armoured clothing and helmets keeping them relatively safe as they advanced. I don’t think there was a plan, just a response, just gunfire.

Dozens of squeakies dead for two more of ours, many more injured on both sides. Our infirmary was overwhelmed. The squeakies had no real idea about medicine, they could re-grow a lost limb, but a broken shell was a death sentence. A single bullet from one of our guns could pass through the material of their entire village or blast a squeakie to pieces.

I wish I could say that was the end of it. The Rebbis didn’t give us any more problems, just huddled in their huts as we built a reservation around their flimsy little village. They got the extra feed-crops we kept for our animals — the gene-tinkered strains with a bit of bamboo in them that sprouted like weeds and were ready to harvest in a couple of weeks. Theoretically they’re human edible too, but not exactly nutritious if you’ve only got one stomach to break it down.

A few months pass, we’re into the second rainy season by this point, and a problem comes up. Our main food crop fails as a local fungal-analogue suddenly develops a taste for terran tubers. We’ve got many weeks until a new resistant crop can get spliced and not enough food stored to get us and the livestock through it.

The humane thing to do would have been to slaughter the animals. Cull the herds down and live off the meat for a while. But you have to understand the risk in that — if these animals went extinct here, there’d be no more coming from home. Not for decades, at least. People who’ve sacrificed everything, every kind of comfort, you’re asking a lot for them to live without fresh milk or the occasional bit of bacon. No, that was never going to fly. We had to start eating the feed-crops, horrible as they were.

We’d been pretty much ignoring the squeakies all this time, but now it turned out we didn’t have enough food to share with them anymore, we had to crack open the fence and convince them to go somewhere else. When we did, we found that they hadn’t exactly been prospering in captivity (oops, sorry, “safety confinement”.) Most of them were sick or malnourished, their shells thinning and cracked. No children that I could see. Clearly the feed-crops were lacking some kind of nutrient the Squeakies needed. The survivors barely resisted as we loaded them up onto transport rollers and drove them a hundred klicks down South and left them in the middle of nowhere with a few bags of feed-crop and some fibre tents. Free to die out of sight.

That was a couple of years ago now, and a lot of that stuff is water under the bridge. The Terran-splice plants are pretty much ruling the roost around the colony these days, which is just as well because there’s a lot more human mouths to feed. Colony’s been expanding as new farms set up all around.

More Squeakies show up from time to time, some little tribe migrating through. Events almost always followed the same pattern; indignation escalating to property damage and then a call for the militia. A few of those farmers are more than happy to get proactive when a Squeakie tribe moves close; there’s more than one fireplace with a collection of polished shells sitting on the mantle above it.

Anyway, I guess we’re real civilised now, because we had ourselves a proper election for mayor and everything. The winner’s main plank was “solving the Squeakie problem.” A lot of folks read what they wanted into that, but it proved a popular position.

So now our militia patrols get to go out and fly drones, looking for the thermal signature of Squeakie campfires. Once we find them, we gas the camp, lock them in cages and transport them a few hundred klicks away to somewhere we don’t care about. We don’t transport their stores or their tools, we just leave them with that same, sad deal as the Rebbis got – feed crops, fibre tents and a few blankets. The gas leaves them sick, kills some of them. We leave them food we know won’t feed them, structures not big enough to house them and no tools to hunt or farm. It would be kinder to simply put a bullet through their shells if you ask me.

I wonder if this is how the neanderthals went, or any one of the half-dozen other species of human that perished to allow modern homo sapiens to rise to the top of the pile.

But no, officially, the plan is to simply “discourage” the Squeakies from coming near our settlement. So as long as we don’t see any Squeakies, it means they’ve taken the hint and gone somewhere else. At the rate the colony is growing, I imagine we’ll have discouraged them out of existence on this continent in a century or two. If history records them at all, it will be as the killers of colonists; brutal violent creatures.

I still have some of their jewellery in a box. Crude, of course, but made with alien eyes and alien thoughts — ones we were never interested in finding out about. I will remember them when they are gone.

~

Bio:

Chris is co-author of the audio drama podcast “Tales From the Aletheian Society” (www.hunterhoose.co.uk) and lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with his two children and co-parent. He’s written gaming material for Cubicle 7, We Evolve and Profound Decisions, and has had a handful of prose stories published in various venues. He really, really wishes he could get more sleep.

Philosophy Note:

The story is an exploration of colonisation. What happens to previously high moral values when a small, isolated community feels threatened? And how do the victors twist the historical narrative to ensure they aren’t seen as the villains?

Fiction

I Know What I Desire

by James C. Clar

In the narrow, labyrinthine streets of the city, there was a nondescript establishment nestled between a taxidermist and a tobacconist. Above its door was a sign that read simply, The Hourglass. If you happened to pass by the shop, and if you happened to take notice of it in the first place, you’d very quickly afterward begin to forget you had ever seen it. On your next trip down that street, you’d probably ask yourself, “where did that shop come from? I’ve never seen it before.” It was that kind of place. All cities have them.

The Hourglass belonged to a man named Alejandro Montoya. He had devoted his life to the accumulation of objects that had long outlived their usefulness. Objects whose provenance, in fact, was often far more intriguing than their original purpose. Among antique maps, unwound clocks and ancient esoteric texts, Montoya took pleasure in ephemera, in the flotsam and jetsam of the past. His store catered to a small but enthusiastic and, luckily for him, wealthy clientele.

One gray, late autumn afternoon just as a light rain had begun to fall, an old man entered the shop. He was tall and gaunt, almost stereotypically so. His coat was stained by both time and the tide. His eyes were blue, the blue of the sea.

Montoya took him for a vagrant or, more likely, a down-on-his-luck sailor too long divorced from his ship. From time to time, street people and others would wander into the shop in search of a handout. He was just about to usher the stranger from the premises when, without preamble, the old man placed a stoppered glass bottle on the counter.

Against his better judgment, Montoya was intrigued. The bottle was emerald-green and was covered in an elaborate network of runes and symbols done in intricate cloisonne. It was a beautiful piece and one of obvious antiquity.

“How much do you want for it?” Montoya asked. He already had a buyer in mind. He knew a collector who would pay a tidy sum for an antique like that.

The old man laughed. “Take it,” he replied. “It’s all yours. I can’t wait to be rid of it. As far as paying for it is concerned, the bottle will exact its own price in due time.”

Before Montoya had a chance to ask for an explanation, the old man turned and left the store. The shopkeeper watched him as he disappeared into what had now turned into a downpour.

Over the next few weeks, Alejandro Montoya studied the ornate bottle for hours. It became an obsession. He would run his fingers over the delicate filigree. He polished it endlessly. More than once he picked up the phone to call a prospective buyer, but something always seemed to prevent him from doing so. His research, thus far, had yielded nothing regarding the object’s origin or age.

One evening, just after closing, Montoya found himself once again contemplating the bottle. The one thing the shopkeeper had not yet done was to pull the stopper from its neck. At least he had no recollection of having done so. That realization surprised him. Curiosity now became his driving motivation. Holding its base with one trembling hand, Montoya carefully removed the stopper with the other. As he did so, a thin wisp of vapor escaped. The vapor curled, coalesced and, within a few seconds, took the shape of a man.

It was a moment before Montoya processed what had just happened. His rational, empirical mind wrestled with what it saw. “You’re a genie,” he murmured, not yet truly believing that it was true.

“Indeed, I am,” the figure in front of him spoke with a voice that seemed both playful and old … as though it had been old even when the world was young. “My name is Azar, and for the record, I find the term ‘genie’ to be so imprecise as to be almost meaningless.”

“Do you not then grant wishes,” Montoya asked.

“Let us just say that I am bound to fulfill desires. There’s a difference.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Montoya spoke with hesitation.

“I’m quite sure you don’t,” Azar response with a chuckle. “In my experience, few mortals do.”

“Please explain yourself.”

“The first thing you must understand,” Azar began, “is that precision is all-important. A ‘wish’, as you put it, must be carefully worded and flow from a genuine, concrete desire. A poorly crafted wish can – and often does – lead to unintended consequences and even disaster.”

Now it was Montoya’s turn to chuckle. “What if I choose not to wish at all?”

“Then I will remain.” Azar looked at the store’s owner with something akin to pity. “I am patient, infinitely so. But, sooner or later, you will wish. They all do.”

#

Weeks passed. Montoya found himself engaging in lengthy conversations with Azar who emerged from his bottle unbidden almost every day. The latter’s knowledge was limitless and spanned centuries. They talked of art, history, literature, science and philosophy. The vagaries of human nature and human ambition were of particular interest to the genie. Try as he might, and despite their growing rapport, Montoya could not forget the implied warning in Azar’s declaration that, as far as wishes were concerned, “precision was all-important.”

“It strikes me,” Montoya observed one night as the two sat talking, “that you enjoy tricking mortals.” The shop’s proprietor had stayed on long after closing.

“I don’t trick them, my friend.” Azar’s teeth seemed to glimmer in the moonlight that filtered into the room amid the bric-a-brac of bygone eras. “Rather, they are undone by their own haste and their almost universal lack of clarity.”

“What if someone were to wish for nothing?”

“Ah, that ancient paradox,” Azar spoke quietly as he leaned forward. “To wish for nothing is in fact to wish for something. Even that wish has ‘content’. Besides, it reflects a desire. A desire that is itself its own negation.”

One afternoon shortly thereafter and, unable to any longer bear the weight of his indecision, Montoya decided to act. Azar materialized before him. His expression was, as usual, inscrutable.

“I’ve made up my mind. I know what I desire.”

“Have you indeed?” Azar’s tone was jovial, almost mocking. “Speak your desire and let the universe conspire to make it so.”

Montoya hesitated, momentarily unsure. He had rehearsed this moment, crafting a wish he believed to be as precise as humanly possible using anything other than the language of mathematics. Still, when the time came …

“I desire,” he began haltingly, “to be granted three wishes for all eternity.”

Azar’s eyes glittered with a strange, ethereal light. “I grant your desire. You have three wishes for all eternity.” Under his breath, the genie murmured “I warned you …”

#

One afternoon shortly thereafter and, unable to any longer bear the weight of his indecision, Montoya decided to act. Azar materialized before him. His expression was, as usual, inscrutable.

“I’ve made up my mind. I know what I desire … I desire to be granted three wishes for all eternity … “

~

Bio:

James C. Clar is a teacher and writer who divides his time between the wilds of Upstate New York and the more moderate climes of Honolulu, Hawaii. Most recently, his work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Journal, Freedom Fiction Journal, The Collidescope, Antipodean Sci-Fi and Sci Phi Journal.

Philosophy Note:

I’ve played with these Borgesian ideas previously in my short fiction. Here, in “I Know what I Desire,” I have two thoughts or questions:

Does a wish without concrete content constitute a wish? (Philosophically, the act of wishing is more about the act of willing than it is about the object of that action/will. If so, then, a wish without content is still a wish since it involves the act of willing desiring itself.)
If, as the ancients believed, words have power, then precision in using those words would be essential — think of an ancient curse or incantation poorly worded. Or, better yet, what would have happened had God not chosen his Word(s) so carefully? “Let there be …” what?

Fiction

Leapers

by Umair Khan

The Fruit told us what it was and from the knowledge it bore by being eaten for so long, told us of the others who ate it. There was a time when we lived oblivious to your world, so that even as you carved our bodies, used our antlers and bones as tools, adorned and treated yourselves with our blood and flesh, we did not understand you. We knew of you, but as with much else in the cold forest, we did not yet understand.

The Fruit grew all around us, sprouting from the ground in rings and clusters, sometimes appearing in a different guise on rocks. Some of us lost ourselves to its ecstasy, wore our teeth out in scouring it from the ground. You had many names for it: the red mushroom, fly agaric, Amanita; our kind knew it as the Fruit. It taught us to dream without sleep and therein, we saw that wakefulness, too, could be a form of sleep. It shone red in light and dark. We communed with it for so long, much before you came along.

And it became more than food, called to us from under the snow. The wandering lights from the sky, the desolate beauty of the tundra now spoke in us, and we danced. The Elders say all this was willed by the Fruit. That it only revealed itself when it had to be eaten, and when not, conspired in whispering webs in the frozen soil. That it had plans well beyond you and us.

You mistook our ease for weakness and preyed on us as we rollicked. By some carnal law, we had always inhered in the land, you devised ways to thrive by living on it. The Fruit taught us the difference. You could not eat it raw. So, you first came to know the Fruit through us. You used our bodies as a vessel and drank our piss for your visions.

The Fruit traveled far and wide in you and it is said, made its move through your tribes. It let itself be changed by you and sent the change back across our herds. In return, over a vast whiteness of time well beyond the reach of what you call history, it gave us something that had been solely yours. We began to dream words.

It took us a while to chew them right. They were strange, somewhat like the tools you used. They split our union with land and leaf and ice, draped our senses with symbols. They appeared as a trick to us because they had the power to veil what they called out to. This is when we saw how you could mistake the word for the world. How you could cut it open like you never saw it.

Caribou. Reindeer. Signs you made for us that you effaced us with. Sacks full of mere echoes of the real thickened with use into lies. Could a name ever bear the weight of our furred hooves against the ice, against the water? Or relay how the scent of all of us may be carried by the scent of one? It tells you nothing of the joy of interlocked antlers; the rush of bones entangled. Of the thousand cadences of meaning in the brush of fur against fur. Of the taste of furry warmth as it descends in huddled ranks. Of tales churned by the clicks of moving limbs. Of moving together as a way of living. Of movement itself as stillness.

We galloped away but there were always more of you wherever we went. At times, we could hear you, drunk on the piss of one of our kin, raving about us with shame for all that you had done. When the Elders saw this, at first, they surmised that you were changing. Perhaps the Fruit was passing on our pleas of pain through the visions it induced in you. Who knows what it really wanted or if it did it all. But nothing changed. You got it all wrong. Concocted reindeer spirits that you saw as more real than us: ghosts conjured to appease your own image. So like you to twist a thing to serve you. What could visions do when you had become accustomed to blindness?

Then, it is known that from a herd on the brink of collapse, the first Leaper was born. The Leaping art was oneiric and mostly, fatal. One had to be seen eating the Fruit in large numbers by your kind and be taken. Surrender to whatever you chose to do until you drank from us. Through sheer verve, retain the memory of the pain of our ancestors. Become all of us in will even as one was being erased. If done right, a mystic force would magic its way beyond the flesh, and Leap into your mind. It would begin to haunt the seer until it had to be spoken or written or sung. Tongue by tongue, body through body, it – we – would Leap among you.

We do not know if this will change you, for you may see it as an illusion, a hallucination of the Fruit, skilled as you are at ascribing so much to your own imagination. It will not matter. Our lament will still lope through the river of your thoughts, and by the power of the Fruit running through your blood, remain therein forever. This is a promise – the only one us Leapers must keep. For in the flesh, we will have long reckoned with the fate of being gone.

~

Bio:

Umair Khan is a writer and academic philosopher from Karachi, currently carrying out their PhD research at the University of Manchester on questions related to consciousness in the use of psychedelic compounds in psychiatry. Their fiction has appeared in Tasavvur, and they are a two-time finalist for the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction. They live with their dogs and a very surly cat, spending much time thinking about human relationships with the animal world, and the pulsing strangeness in between.

Philosophy Note:

Near the end of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, descriptions of the cosmology of Siberian shamans and their relationship to reindeer had a near hypnotic effect on me. Words don’t always reach that far down, but in those passages, they met me in my bones. That night, I dreamt of a reindeer digging through snow in the taiga. Reindeer have been observed acting strangely after eating fly agaric mushrooms and licking psychedelic lichen from rocks; this fact along with the image in my dream became the inspiration for Leapers. This story considers issues related to animal consciousness, the limits and transformative power of language, and the possibility of collective resistance. It tries to imagine how human language might be acquired to describe a perspective rooted in a different body, beyond the human, but also explores how it might transform a non-human way of being in the world.

Fiction

The Religious Education Of Rotisserie Opera

by Timothy Quinn

Rotisserie Opera was knit together with patient exasperation from the DNA of a forensic accountant and a tenured philosopher, and was a clever if argumentative child. By two, he knew the words “quiet” and “nut butter” and “hatchery.” By four, the harried algorithms had begun to teach him geography (he lived within the pressurized sphere of the world, which was three and a half cubic kilometers), history (his ancestors had somehow preferred to walk on walls to get around), religion (all were promised a chance at eternal life in the ancient but unequivocal Orphic tradition), and basic photoelectrochemical grid repair.

At six, his cohort had the run of the world, because the algorithms were already busy bleaching the incubators and running saline through glucose drips in preparation for another culturing. There were labyrinthine corridors with doors that opened onto emergency access shafts and secret maintenance tunnels, and floating through the cabins and storage bays they found paperback books and playing cards and bits of jewelry tangled in the exposed plumbing.

The liberated children were inevitably drawn to the amphitheater, which was ribbed with scaffolding and countless other hiding spots, and which had the largest view of the sky. A few had learned the new constellations, and all of the children recognized the tiny smear of starlight that swept overhead, because that was Hades.

“Is it getting closer?” wondered Core Rabbit, who spelled her name “Kore,” apparently in some fashion after Persephone.

“Why?” asked Rote, who wasn’t as devout and didn’t think it a promising sign that the underworld, which had once been a glittering pinprick, might now be a slightly larger dapple against the vast galactic scorch.

“My katabasis,” said Kore, referring to her religious journey, which Rote had understood to be allegorical. “Soon it’ll be close enough for us to float right across.”

“Good luck finding a damn airlock,” said Helicopter Bean, whose genome had been crafted from a microbiologist and a theologian, and who therefore had some ideas about the intersection of science and religion.

“Tata,” called Kore, “where is the airlock, please?”

After much debate and with great reluctance, the algorithms showed them several airlocks. The closest was a few meters from the amphitheater.

“May we enter the airlock?” asked Rote.

The algorithms sputtered that no, of course not, it would be unsafe to do so. There might be a few adult EVA suits bumping about, but having lost most of the world’s data in the Venting (Heli rolled his eyes at doctrinaire capitalization) and then in subsequent waves of high energy particles, no one had gotten around to auditing protective gear for a long absent crew. There were children to be engineered, and that took the highest priority.

The algorithms seemed always to be busy engineering children, and despite their haste Rote thought they were becoming pretty good at it. His cohort was larger than the last, and also there was something about the first few children, who had grown now into their awkward preteens, which seemed dicey. They didn’t say much as they floated around, staring glassily at the broken machinery they were expected to decipher and fix. They had numbers instead of names, which was another innovation the algorithms had introduced in recent cohorts, having restored some of the wikis and user manuals thought lost to the gaping void.

“Do I have to go?” asked Rote, who was still thinking about this business of a religious quest. “What if I can’t come back?”

In fact, very little of the data available to the children related to religion. What survived was limited to a narrow period of antiquity populated by winged serpents and vengeful minor deities, and didn’t offer the algorithms much practical advice on childrearing. This paucity, in some of the children, nurtured skepticism that the whole endeavor was an exercise in psychological motivation, but for others created a burning eschatological faith.

“Stay here,” teased Heli. “If you’re lucky, you’ll get recycled, probably forever.”

“That’s not true,” said Kore. “Persephone visits Hades every year, and she has to travel all the way from Locri. Tell them, Tata.”

The algorithms reassured them that there were many paths to salvation, that the gods were fickle but fair, and that they whispered to children on all the worlds. Yes, they sighed, in Locri. Yes, in Ismaros, too.

“The same gods?” asked Heli skeptically.

“How many worlds?” asked Rote.

There are countless worlds of polite and obedient children, the algorithms said, their attention clearly already elsewhere. Look up, and perhaps somewhere there’s another child looking back at you.

#

“It just looks like a star,” said Isabella, disappointed that their vessel had stopped at an unreasonably safe distance.

“Watch,” said her father, zooming in, and now the tiny bright star had a smeared halo from the starlight forced to bend around it. “Wait,” he said, and increased the screen’s sensitivity to the edges of the electromagnetic spectrum. The neutron star was bathed now in false color, X-ray filaments radiating out in graceful aquamarine.

“Where are the seeds?” asked Isabella.

Her father zoomed out again and pointed at the screen. “It’s too small to see, but here’s what it looks like.” He called up an image of the seedship taken by one of the paparazzi probes. The damage was extraordinary. Generational seedships had been built for volume rather than elegance, and this one was in the process of collapsing around the punctured remains of the largest segment. The depressurization would have been cataclysmic, violently shunting it off course and bringing it here within reach of the fading stellar core.

“You see,”he said. “It’s getting very close now.”

“It doesn’t look close,” said Isabella, doubtfully.

“Well, it’s moving very, very quickly. By the time we get home, it’ll have already become part of the star.”

“Are there people on it?”

Genetic material, frozen biology. Not people really. But he didn’t want to say that. “No, love. It’s just a broken old machine.”

~

Bio:

Timothy Quinn is a Toronto-based author and technologist whose work can be found in Analog, Nature, Metastellar, On Spec, Factor Four and elsewhere. He runs the Dark Data Project, which assists humanitarian- and conservation-focused organizations with challenging data problems. He can be found on various social networks and at https://by.timothyquinn.com.

Philosophy Note:

“The Religious Education of Rotisserie Opera” explores the nature of belief in a closed ecosystem, and begs the question of whether a manufactured metaphysics is really so different than those social, cultural and religious frameworks in which we’re raised today. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion are recommended reading, as is of course William Golding’s timeless Lord Of The Flies.

Fact & Opinion

Religion? In The Space Age?

by Tsvi Bisk

Who needs religion? We have science, we have reason, we have that infinite resource, the human imagination. Of what use are the Bronze and Iron Age babblings of our legacy traditions? Aren’t these religions a tremendous barrier to humanity’s ability to build a space-age civilization? And why should devotees of Science Fiction even care about these questions? My answer would be: read the entry Transcendence in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and pay attention to what the giants of the genre say themselves. Stanley Kubrick stated that “the God concept is at the heart of 2001 — but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God”. Arthur Clarke said that the film’s final act reveals “a realm that I think can best be characterized as spiritual.” In his book Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television, Douglas Cowen demonstrates how religious ideas are presented in Science Fiction as the genre of possibility and hope in an era of despair and anxiety; that there is something larger than ourselves that gives our lives meaning and value. The best of Science Fiction reinforces our hope that outside the boundaries of everyday living there lies something greater.

It is remarkable how many prominent agnostics and atheists have expressed the need for some kind of alternative transcendent veneration as necessary to our “being” human. Freud’s disciple, Otto Rank, wrote that the “need for a truly religious ideology … is inherent in human nature and its fulfillment is basic to any kind of social life”. Carl Jung agreed when he wrote that without a divine drama we cannot have meaning and without meaning we are set adrift and cannot be well. Carl Sagan encompassed both these views when he wrote: “A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” Einstein anticipated Sagan by writing “… the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.” Einstein’s other musings include, “What is the meaning of human life or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion … the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life”.

In other words, ‘What does it all mean?‘ is still the ultimate question regarding the human condition. This riddle has motivated religious and philosophical speculation, scientific endeavor, artistic creativity and entrepreneurial innovation throughout the ages. It is the question we try to answer in order to make sense of our own existence. Indeed, it has generated the modern concepts of angst and alienation. Centuries ago, French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote:

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

Pascal’s despair is the first cry of modern-day anxiety; a product of our own scientific progress. What, after all, is the point of our own individual, ephemeral lives on this small planet around a mediocre star in a midsized galaxy of some 400 billion stars whose closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, contains one trillion stars, in an ‘observable universe’ that numbers two trillion galaxies (the largest containing 100 trillion stars)? The “observable universe” being just a tiny portion of the universe which may contain 500 trillion galaxies and might be an infinitesimal part of a multiverse containing trillions upon trillions of “universes”!

Increased awareness of the vastness of existence has introduced anxieties from which humanity has never recovered. Pascal wrote in the 17^th century. What gloom are we supposed to feel today when “the infinite immensity of spaces” is immensely more immense? Never in history has Pascal’sdespair been so relevant. After all, even within the cosmically insignificant history of our own planet, what is the real significance of our own lives? Consider that Earth is 4.5 billion years old; that life arose 3.8 billion years ago; mammals 200 million years ago; primitive humans 2.5 million years ago; modern humans 150,000 years ago; recorded history 6,000 years ago; the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Constitutionalism, Industrial Revolution and Democracy all within the last 500 years. Currently, humans have an 80-90 year lifespan, which might increase to 120-150 years by the end of this century. What is this in relation to the “eternity” which preceded human civilization on this planet and which will succeed it? Does the Cosmos ‘care’ who is elected President of the United States? Does the Cosmos ‘care’ about the 3.8 billion-year history of life on this planet? Would it ‘care’ if runaway global warming turned our planet into another Venus? When contemplating this time scale on the background of the vastness of our Cosmos, it is difficult not to plunge into existential desolation.

The irony is that science – a creation of the human spirit reflecting our species’ curiosity and imagination at its highest stage of development – has revealed an existence of such vastness and complexity that it makes our collective and individual lives seem inconsequential. Since the 20^th century, the elemental question for thoughtful people had become: Is life worth living? Existentialist author Albert Camus wrote,

There is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide … Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories comes afterward”. Indeed, why not commit suicide and avoid the tribulations of a meaningless existence? Everything else, all our cultural and scientific product, is marginalia to this ultimate existential question.

In response to Camus, and other pretentious prophets of meaninglessness, I would say that our subjective human experience is future-directed; we implicitly assume it is leading to something significant and this makes sense of our lives. This is why we do not commit suicide. We assume our individual lives have meaning. We assume (and recent science supports this assumption) that every individual is unique, that every individual is distinctive in the entire Cosmos, that in all of infinite nature, no one is identical to us. There is, of course, correspondence and species similarity connecting every human being, and probably all conscious beings in the Cosmos, by virtue of their consciousness. But our own individuality is a cosmic absolute, as is the uniqueness of every distinctive culture and civilization which is a product of self-reflective conscious life. Cosmic evolution produced our uniqueness and perhaps this uniqueness might be valuable to cosmic evolution. It is up to us to decide.

We now realize that evolution is the salient characteristic of existence itself, having produced ever more complex elements, which eventually evolved into life and continued to produce ever more complex life forms, until it produced self-reflective consciousness. We must allow the possibility, along with philosopher Henri Bergson, that evolution will eventually produce a supra–consciousness that will ultimately produce a supra-supra-consciousness, and so on, until a ‘life form’ will have been created that will appear to us as if it were a God. In the words of Israeli thinker Mordechai Nessyahu “not ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’ but ‘in the end an evolving Cosmos will have created God'”. This would be Cosmodeism – the veneration of the Godness of existence as such. Science fiction is rampant with such speculations. Arthur Clarke, in 2001 A Space Odyssey wrote:

A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions (italics mine), that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit.” And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.

In Childhood’s End, Clarke introduced the concept of the Overmind as a cosmic collective of supra–conscious species under the direction of a supra-supra consciousness to determine if and when conscious species were ready to ‘grow up’ and advance towards amalgamating with the universal supra-supra consciousness. Nietzsche, with his concept of the Overman (Supraman) certainly would have been sympathetic to Clarke’s view. More significant, Clarke speculated that “It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.” In similar fashion, the magnificently unique science fiction writer, Olaf Stapledon, spoke about the emergence of God in a talk at the British Interplanetary Society entitled “Interplanetary Man”:

Perhaps the final result of the cosmical process is the attainment of full cosmical consciousness, and yet (in some very queer way) what is attained in the end is also, from another point of view, the origin of all things. So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end.

Such notions of God as the consequence rather than the cause of the Cosmos are not unusual in serious theological and philosophical speculations. Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, viewed God as both the cause and the consequence of cosmic existence and evolution. He saw the end of human history as pure consciousness becoming one with the creator Alpha God to spawn the created Omega God. Anglo-Jewish philosopher Samuel Alexander, in Space Time and Deity, promoted the idea that the internal logic of evolutionwill eventually result in the emergence of deity. German philosopher and theologian Benedikt Göcke has written: “We … are therefore responsible for the future development of the life of the divine being.” Architect and philosopher Paolo Soleri, greatly influenced by de Chardin, saw technology as being an instrument enabling sentient life to evolve into ‘God’.

Historian Robert Tucker noted that “The movement of (German) thought from Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of man’s self-realization as a godlike being, or alternatively as God”. According to him what attracted Marx to Hegel was that “he found in Hegel the idea that man is God”. History for Hegel was God realizing itself through the vehicle of man. Recently Dr. Ted Chu in Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision of Our Future Evolution argued the case for the eventuality of a Cosmic Being (the CoBe).

For me it is axiomatic that existence is hierarchal: evolution producing ever more complex configurations, of which self-reflective, volitional consciousness is Planet Earth’s current pinnacle. Our human duty, therefore, is to strive towards a transcendent humanism; to volitionally seek to evolve our species into supra-humans (or as Nietzsche might have put it, into Supraman). It is our duty to overcome ourselves; to realize our divine potential; not to transcend humanism but to become transcendent humans: supra-humans.

The Godding of the Cosmos is an inherent characteristic of its evolving actuality. Godding is a word coined by Rabbi David Cooper in his book God is a Verb in which he notes thatthe Hebrew word for God is a verb not a noun. Yehova literally means ‘will become manifest’ and is an imperfect verb. The Burning Bush tells Moses its name is ahiya asher ahiya. This isalso an imperfect verb formwhich has been poorly translated as “I Am that I Am” but which properly translated means “I will Be what I will Be”.

Conscious life on this planet is an integral and vital part of this divine cosmic drama. What our species does, and what we do as individuals will contribute to or detract from this process. Accordingly, our individual lives do have cosmic consequence, no matter how infinitesimally small (similar to the butterfly effect of chaos theory). The very chaos of our existence is the vital ingredient creating the cosmos (order) of existence. This is to place the emergence of self-reflective consciousness at the center of the Jungian Divine Drama; to affirm that cosmic purpose has been created as a consequence of the evolutionary cosmic process. This is a neo-teleological perspective, the civilizational consequences of which might be as profound as those of Monotheism. This would be the proper antidote to Pascal’s despair, rather than a self-deceptive return to the ‘eternal verities’ of the legacy monotheistic religions or existentialist invented meanings or wallowing in postmodernist anxiety.

Arguably, cosmic civilizations that pursue this ambition will succeed in transcending their bodies by scientific and technical means, thus isolating and enhancing the most essential part of their ‘humanness’ – their consciousness. They will, in effect, have become pure consciousness, or if you will, pure spirit expanding throughout the Cosmos. Arthur Clarke in 2001 anticipated this with the kind of speculative imagination we should be cultivating in ourselves and in our children:

… evolution was driving toward new goals. The first… had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transformed into shining new homes of metal and plastic… they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves…

Consciousness will have become one with a Cosmos that has dissolved into pure radiation as an inevitable consequence of entropy. Thus the Cosmos will become in its entirety a conscious universal being – i.e. a ‘God’ as the consequence of the Cosmos and not as its cause. The fateful question that every conscious civilization throughout the Cosmos must eventually address is: will we take part in this cosmic race for survival in the ‘End of Days’, or will we perish along with the rest of all that exists? Will we accept the limitations of our physicality, or will we try to transcend them?

~

Bio:

Tsvi Bisk’s most recent book (available on Amazon) is Cosmodeism: A Worldview for the Space-Age: How an Evolutionary Cosmos is Creating God from which this article is derived.

Fiction

The Prayer

by Humphrey Price

It was the last chance to save my crew. Yeah, we’d made some mistakes when we arrived in our starship invading like conquistadors. We slaughtered multitudes of them, and they killed many of us. Our ambitious leader, Captain Rocetz, underestimated the alien race known as the Spledici. Who knew they possessed antimatter beam cannons? They could have obliterated our entire fleet, but they showed mercy and allowed us to surrender.

I didn’t approve of the Nisei Data Company’s colonial aspirations, but I was an indentured conscript with my family held hostage back home, so I had no say in the matter. As the ship’s official alien liaison, my request had been granted to have an audience with the Spledici High Priest. Little was known of their strange alien mythology.

The Captain waited outside with our crew after arriving in a shuttlecraft. It was a beautiful world with a breathable atmosphere and comfortable environment. I alone was allowed to enter the temple to be met by the High Priest and led into the Holy Chamber.

Helckemezid, a brown furry ape-like being, spoke through an AI translator. “Your people have attacked us like savages. Now you must face God, and She will pass judgement. She will decide if you live or die.”

I felt bold and risked asking the question, “Does God decide or do you decide?”

“I will interpret God’s decision.”

At the far end of the chamber hung a fabric curtain, beyond which lay the Holy of Holies. The High Priest said, “Before you face judgement, you must understand what you are about to behold. God is the supreme intelligence and designer of the universe. As with all conscious entities, thinking and memory require the processing and storage of information which must take place in a real manifestation, or they cannot exist. There is no supernatural magic in our universe. So how does God think? Where is She physically located?”

I tried to remember my history lessons on religion and mythology. “I thought God was supposed to be everywhere.”

“She is everywhere, spanning our entire universe.”

“How can God be everywhere in a physical form which we cannot see?”

“This will be revealed to you.”

Helckemezid drew back the curtain, exposing the innermost chamber. At the far end sat a gold-colored rectangular box with a transparent cylinder suspended above. “We shall now enter and stand in the presence of The Lord.” Helckemezid pulled the curtain closed behind us, plunging the alcove into darkness.

“The outer surface of the Sacred Cylinder is a display screen viewing a volume of space inside that is less than the size of an atom. Our technology allows us to view the quantum realm in real time, without disturbing the observations.”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw flashes of light in the cylinder. They were different colors and appeared evenly dispersed. I stood in silence, mesmerized, as the flashes waxed and waned in random patterns.

“Am I seeing virtual particles and antiparticles being created and annihilated?”

“Yes,” the priest answered, “This is vacuum energy. These events are the firing of the synapses of the cosmos. Just like the synapses in your brain or the switching elements in a computer processor, you are glimpsing God thinking.”

“If the quantum foam is really God’s brain, then how does God interact with the universe?”

“She can create particles, matter, and energy at will. The quantum fluctuations are not really random. They just appear that way to us. By controlling this energy, She has the power to create and destroy and perform miracles. She can manipulate matter and energy as She pleases, never violating the laws of physics She crafted. And now, if you are to live, you must pray to God.”

I was terrified. I had never prayed in my life, and I didn’t believe any of this crap, but I had to come up with something. “God, it is amazing to be here and see you.”

The flashes of light stopped, and the chamber went dark. I heard a gasp from the High Priest. Then the flashes started up again. Helckemezid looked concerned.

This is just some kind of gimmick, I thought, but I knew I needed to make a contrite appeal. “My people have sinned, and we need your help.” A bright series of particle creations and annihilations cascaded across the cylinder. “Please guide us in bringing peace to our worlds. We pledge that we will depart and in the future engage with the Spledici only if they so wish. I beseech you to please forgive me and my crew for our horrible transgressions.”

The chamber lit up with an explosion of activity for several seconds. Then it reverted back to the usual random behavior. A brisk wind blew through the enclosed chamber carrying a subliminal voice that breathed, Only the truly wicked shall be punished. Certainly, I had just imagined this hallucination.

“I have never witnessed such an occurrence,” the priest whispered in awe. “You have been forgiven, and you shall live. Now having God’s favor, you will also receive the gift of eternal life.”

“You believe there is life after death?”

“This is in our scriptures.”

“How can that be so? All of our thoughts, memories, and experiences reside in our brain. When that dies, we can no longer think or be aware of anything.”

“God preserves your memories and all of your thought patterns in a system backup. The backup is maintained at all times and kept instantaneously up to date. That stored information is your soul. When you die, God has your full system image ready to restore and resurrect your brain in a new body in the afterlife.”

“And where exactly does God keep my soul, my system backup?”

“In an almost infinite quantum computer, the fabric of the universe, God’s brain.”

“You mean in the quantum fluctuations that we just observed.”

“Yes.”

“We are one with God then.”

“It is perfect, is it not?”

I was not convinced. I thought this whacky religion was all a bunch of hooey, but at least our crew was saved. As I left the temple, there was a commotion outside. The Captain had been struck dead by a bolt of lightning.

~

Bio:

Humphrey Price is a space systems engineer who has contributed to robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. You can follow his writings at humphreyprice.com.

Philosophy Note:

This piece explores what type of religion an advanced alien culture might have. Throughout human history, most cultures have believed in some type of religious construct to explain the universe and our place in it and attempt to appeal to a god or gods in order to control outcomes so as to be in our favor. The fictional idea in the story presents a construct for God and creation that could be measurable, understood, and not require any supernatural violations of the laws of physics. This notional alien religion would also allow for divine intervention in past and current events, performing acts that would be interpreted as miracles, and provide for the possibility of eternal life after death.

Fiction

Arbor Ad Infernum

by George Salis

The uniformity of this tree-canopied earth strikes you as an obscenity. Never before have you beheld such an arboreal height limit, breached by neither leaf nor branch-tip. Indeed, all have fallen in line, including yews, beeches, birches, larches, willows, gingkos, monkey puzzles, sycamores, sequoias, banyans, baobabs, dragon trees, olive trees, palm trees, rainbow eucalyptuses, jellyfish trees, cherry blossom trees, bastard quiver trees, and Glastonbury thorns, not to mention trees no one has ever seen before, such as those that, in the spirit of Batesian mimicry, evolved anthropological shapes, gnarled faces whose mouths foamed with cerise sap, limbs fingered with opposable chutes, crowns styled as afros, bobs, mohawks, and other features to intimidate their neighbors.

You notice that the core of this earth exists as a colossal knot of roots that double as their own soil. Symbiotic insects grow into twigs as inverted buds and act as oxygen eaters, contributing to the atmospheric balance, the global breathing. Further scrutiny reveals that the equilibrium of the altitude limit is the consequence of a diplomatic ruler, the first and thus the frailest, a once-towering Ished Tree, a Yggdrasil, an axis mundi now sapped to the point of a six-foot sapling, a height by which all others are measured and tethered, every species bowing or crouching in accordance with the ruler’s forest-wide truce (putting the topiary in utopia), which sees to it that no crown shall out-shadow another, none reaching its boughs higher at the expense of the lower elders or younglings.

You see, these trees are not what one might remember from a backyard long ago, where lone oaks could stretch their gigantic branches with impunity, no, these are the organisms of a virescent evolution that took root well after the self-extinguishment of anything like humanoids. In the freedom of an unbalanced lifeform equation, trees begat trees who begat trees who begat trees until the susurrations between leaves morphed into wind-words, sibilant sentences that allowed for a linguistic cross-pollination, and thus the plant kingdom bloomed into a much more collaborative civilization. This is not to say that perennial peace came about by dint of deciduous discussions, no, for the trees shook, barked, and felled each other during centuries of growing pains, shadows from the loftiest expanding like one-dimensional clouds of pestilence that suffocated loved ones in sluggish, curling deaths, trauma that manifested in survivors as black tree rings, mourning bands embedded in the manner of internal scars over time. A pruning of ambitious deplorables proved necessary, a vine-imprisoning of selfish transgressors for as long as it took for re-education to produce a change of heartwood in a troublesome maple here, a nefarious cypress there, and only then could the revolution of truncated trunks lead to a green harmony heretofore unseen if ever even dreamed.

The status quo lasts for a millennium, safeguarded by the ruler’s twelve floral disciples, a sturdy Cercis siliquastrum among them, otherwise known as a Judas Tree, one who can only fadingly recall the vivid pink flowers of his ancestors. The more he feasts on the meager rations of light allotted to him, the more he yearns for his lineage’s most radiant of hues to replace his pale and puny adornments, but he has no chance of fulfilling this desire without dedicating himself to avaricious photosynthesis. How can he grow into his greatest form if one flower higher means penalty by death? Who is the ruler to curtail an entire citizenry, to keep it on the edge of starvation? Such shallow breathing will precede a scream if it lasts but one century longer. Still, the Judas Tree conspires in unsuspecting quiet before testing the winds in search of accomplices outside the others in that abjectly allegiant dozen. It proves all too easy to recruit those who long for the dizziness of sky-scratching heights, of potent light that can birth broods and broods of juicy fruits, gems of another kind. Are not these aspirations written into our very genes? That eunuch eugenicist would have us as grounded as our wormy roots rather than soaring like those extinct creatures once called birds.

For his frailness, the first and formerly regal tree has long since camouflaged himself among the penurious rest, no one other than the twelve disciples privy to his true identity so that they alone can carry out his commands and tend to his harrowing health, and so it remains the Judas Tree’s responsibility to identify the head that needs cleaving. Once the traitors’ intent to takeover is solidified with wrought-iron whispers, the prime malefactor snakes forward an under-branch and kisses the nameless ruler with the petals of a flower whose shade resembles a sallow salmon, and therefore the coup commences, the Judas Tree’s fellow insurrectionists lashing out their branches to stifle their desiccated despot unto dust through and through. How swiftly the mutiny transforms into a marathon, every tree indulging in postmature growth spurts, frenetic giraffe stretches. Upward and upward, they streak like mahogany comets through the sky. For too long have they lapped and supped at a claustrophobic trough, ordered to be satisfied with scintillas, so many of the other trees hugging themselves out of fear and obedience, but no longer, because the Judas Tree shall lead them to a higher place, one in which the strongest and most beautiful shall bathe in the liquid gold of sunlight, tilting their heads into an endless faucet of life made sweeter by its opposite. He informs his co-conspirators that they made it, they are in the clear and can stop growing for now, time to regroup and plan the next phase of a brighter kingdom, but they don’t stop because they don’t trust him, no, no one trusts any other to cease flourishing, for even a few feet lower than the rest can spell their deaths, in which they would join the dumbly loyal others who, under the tonnage of so much shadow, now flatten into decaying plant matter, further fuel for the new ruler, and so rebel rebels against rebel, growing and growing beyond any giant beanstalk in the heavens.

The Judas Tree’s only hope lies in an entrapment of the sun as a whole, absorbing every ecstatic ray, but first he must close the cold gap between the earth and the ether, such a Zeno reach, yet the solar flare that flings outward to meet him is no such godly arm. Instead, that blinding life-giver’s touch lights the wooden fuse and causes a global conflagration that roasts marshy, mellow souls till all turns to ash. In that blackest of planetary cinders, hope acts as the fertilizer from which a sooty seedling peeks.

~

Bio:

George Salis is the author of the novel Sea Above, Sun Below. After a decade, he has finished his second novel, Morpholocal Echoes. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. He’s also the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature. His website is www.GeorgeSalis.com.

Fiction

Heaven Bound

by Russell Fee

The night sky was aflame with burning bodies. Overhead, thousands of celestial cremations were taking place.

According to the readout on the screen of the tracker given to me by the funeral home, the capsule cradling my grandfather was reentering the atmosphere where, within seconds, it would ignite and plunge through the firmament as a lighted torch, exploding above me in a conflagration of fire and blazing metal, my grandfather’s ashes becoming one with the heavens. With the aid of the tracker, I would know the point in the sky and the exact moment of his incineration.

The development of cheap solid propellants and light disposable rockets the size of coffins revolutionized the funeral industry overnight. The growing clamber to launch deceased loved ones to the outer edge of the thermosphere became a stampede.

The industry’s pitch was, “Heaven bound? Have the sendoff of a Viking prince with an audience of millions. You deserve nothing less.” In keeping with the theme, the capsules were christened snekkes (pronounced s-nick-ahs) – Norse for the smaller Viking funeral ships.

The scheduled simultaneous launches across the country of thousands of snekkes filled the sky with showers of flame as they fell towards earth. The monthly show was a national communal event.

The spectacle of death had never been more entertaining. But to me it was a modern-day Roman circus replete with its prurient fascination and enthrallment with death.

My grandfather’s launch was a blinding flash that propelled his capsule into the heavens with such speed that it vanished from view within seconds. In what seemed only seconds more, the tracker pinpointed one of the thousand blazing orbs above me as my grandfather’s. I watched as down they all plummeted, each with a luminous trail of sparks, until they, almost as one, burned themselves out in a final brilliant burst of light, leaving only the stars to mark their passage.

#

As I drove home, I thought back on my grandfather’s excitement about his launch. It began when we took him to attend the astral display of a mass cremation. He was in hospice then, but we had received permission to take him to a viewing area. When the night sky became alive with the falling capsules, he had looked up from his wheelchair and raised an arm, pointing to the flames. “I want that,” he said. “I want it.”

From then on, his life, or what remained of it, was devoted to the preparation of his sendoff. He somehow summoned a reserve of energy that fueled an almost joyful race to his demise—a marked contrast to his earlier surrender to an emotional and physical decay. He directed the decoration of the skin of his snekke (it was to be painted dark and light blue, the colors of his first car) and chose those things that would go with him into the heavens, including his service medals and the necklace he gave my grandmother on their wedding day. He picked the suit he retired in to wear.

Such strange enthusiasm in the face of death had perplexed and disturbed me. But as I watched through the windows of the crush of cars carrying the deceased’s loved ones home, I saw that none were grieving. Instead, their expressions were radiant. My grandfather had held the same visage the night he watched the extravaganza of the funereal snekkes.

I understood then that he had perceived in the night sky what I had not: He would not pass away alone. Thousands would go with him into the beyond, and thousands more would be witnesses. In the end, he no longer feared his death. He had experienced death’s ubiquity. He had seen what would come after. And he had embraced it.

Til Valhalla.

~

Bio:

Russell Fee is the author of the multi-award-winning Sheriff Matt Callahan mystery series. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Star 82 Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, Witcraft, Literally Stories, Spank the Carp, Short Circuit, and Hemingway Shorts. To learn more about Russ and his work, visit his website at outerislandpress.com,

Philosophy Note:

This story ponders the burgeoning popularity of mass celestial cremations.

Editorial

Sci Phi Journal 2025/2 – Summer Issue For Download

Northen hemisphere summer brings vacation vibes, sunny days, balmy nights and a fresh breeze of stories. Sci Phi Journal’s 2025 Q2 issue features another original solarpunk cover art by Dustin Jacobus, inspired by the age-old dream of humankind’s liberation from labour, applied to the harvest season.

If you like to peruse your quarterly dose of speculative philosophy printed on trusty old paper, or the slightly less old, but no less trusty screen of your e-reader, go ahead and download your free PDF copy just below.

We sincerely hope our collection of tales and essays, this time loosely dedicated to the dilemmas of progress and the place of human creativity therein, will serve as a stimulating read for the months ahead!

Enjoy the journey,

the Sci Phi crew

Sci Phi Journal 2025Q2 Download

Editorial

Editorial – Sci Phi Journal 2025/2

Lectori salutem.

Spring is giving way to summer in the northern hemisphere, which in Belgium merely means a gradual change in the angular velocity of rain drops that incessantly pummel the roofs under which yet another issue of Sci Phi Journal was lovingly crafted for you by our enthusiastic, if slightly D-vitamin deficient crew.

Our 2025 summer edition is once again thematic, in the loosest of senses, around topics of progress and creativity as seen through the lens of contemporary SF. It is often said that science fiction is the literature of ideas; indeed, by reading into the concerns and musings of writers interested in the future, one may get a sense of the questions that preoccupy the collective mind. A map of what troubles us as a species, as it were.

This time around, our tales revolve around AI, science, extraterrestrial exploration and the price society pays for the march of technological advancements, particularly if their pace outstrips our ability to adapt. These are complemented by two essays, covering changes in both our relations with humanity’s artificial creations, and the formal conventions of the SF genre itself, harkening back to the poetry of Arthur C. Clarke.

On a related note, while our crew would have to miss the annual European SF gathering due to clashing commitments, we hope that some of our readers make it to Archipelacon, which after our fantastic sojourn in Rotterdam last year carries on the torch of the EuroCon tradition – to be followed by MetropolCon in Berlin in 2026, where Sci Phi Journal will definitely be on the programme once more!

In the meantime, whether your region of the world is gradually heading into summer holidays or a cooler season, we hope the latest issue provides some welcome inspiration for thought experiments.

Speculatively yours,

the Sci Phi co-editors & crew

~

Fiction

Beyond The Sea

by Kevin Eric Paul

The first wife of Priest Zarda extended her tendrils towards him and began puffing out a precise mixture of pheromones.

“Husband. Must you leave your harem? Your females will miss you dearly, and our latest clutch will begin hatching soon.”

The stout, pale orange worm turned its eyeless head towards her and directed a series of pheromone puffs to her receptors. “My First. We have discussed this. I must find the Creator. Leave me to my preparations.”

“Husband. Priest. There will be many dangers. Is your faith not enough?”

Zarda considered that. “I…suppose it is not. I must discover the truth for myself. But do not be afraid–if something goes wrong during the expedition, you and the other females have my clone. I have trained him well.”

“But he’s not you, husband!”

“I am sorry. I do plan on returning–once I have met the Creator.”

“Yes, husband. Be sure that you do.” She retracted her tendrils dejectedly and used her setae to return to the harem pit, extending and contracting her body along the way. She puffed out a last signal to express her worry before exiting Zarda’s chamber.

#

The pilot of the great bioship Brackla puffed instructions to stand by for departure into its receptors at the helm. Genetically designed and grown to provide habitat and sustenance for the worms onboard, the ship was to bore through the mantle and crust and bring its occupants to the surface for the first time in history.

“Surveyor Yorba,” signaled Priest Zarda, “Is Brackla prepared to begin the ascent?”

“Yes, Priest,” puffed Yorba. “We begin the expedition on your order.”

“Very well. Helm, instruct Brackla to commence boring.”

“Right away, Priest,” answered the pilot.

The bioship groaned in response and began chewing through the upper mantle with its diamond teeth. The crushed silicate rock passed through the middle of its body as it pulled itself forward with dozens of powerful, diamond-tipped claws. The interior of Brackla vibrated with the effort as it accelerated to maximum boring speeds.

“Status report, Surveyor?” Priest Zarda asked twenty hours later.

“We have traveled nearly two hundred kilometers and should reach the crust in approximately forty-two hours.”

“Well ahead of schedule. And the temperature?”

“Dropped another 200C, Priest. Only 1400C now, but Brackla can handle the cold. Though if this continues…”

“Have faith, Surveyor. It will grow warmer again. It will be as it was in the ancient stories passed down through my order.”

“Yes, Priest,” Yorba puffed with renewed confidence.

#

“We’ve reached the crust,” announced the pilot. “Minutes away from breaking through. Brackla is experiencing no difficulties with the denser rock and metals.”

“Very good. Temperature?”

“1700C and rising, Priest. You were right,” puffed Yorba.

“Breaching the crust now,” the pilot’s pheromones communicated, though he was unable to hide a touch of fear and anxiety.

The big bioship shuddered with uncertainty.

“Surveyor Yorba?” prompted Zarda.

“A moment, Priest,” he replied before puffing various queries into Brackla’s receptors. “We are in…liquid, Priest. A sea of…mostly molten silicon dioxide. With sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate. Temperate is…1850C,” Yorba puffed with a sense of awe. “Molten above as it is below…”

“The legends were true…But what lies beyond it? Pilot, instruct Brackla to continue upwards through this…sea.”

“Yes, Priest.” The bioship vibrated in agreement after receiving its orders.

Hours later, Brackla breached the surface. The glowing orange sea bubbled around the bioship as it attempted to make sense of its surroundings.

“Why have we stopped?” asked Zarda.

Yorba puffed signals of uncertainty and confusion. “There’s nothing else for us to travel though, Priest.”

“Explain.”

“There’s…nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you–”

“Just that. It’s…emptiness. Openness. The endless sea and nothing more. And somehow, it’s warmer. 2100C.”

Zarda puffed a sense of disbelief. “Impossible. Where is the Creator? The paradise that was promised?”

No worm puffed for several minutes. Then Yorba signaled excitement.

“What is it?” asked the Priest.

“Brackla senses something. An enormous sphere, radiating energy, heating the sea. It’s very far away, deep into the nothingness. But it’s there, and much hotter than even the core.”

“…The Creator?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then our journey is not over. Gather all the data you can, then we will return home. One day we’ll come back here. Once we’ve learned how to travel beyond the sea.”

~

Bio:

Kevin Eric Paul is a Finnish-Canadian fiction writer currently residing in Ottawa (originally Thunder Bay). He enjoys working on genre novels and short stories, always under the close supervision of his old tortoiseshell cat Mittens.

Philosophy Note:

This is a classic tale of metaphysics, a search for God and the meaning of existence – but told from the perspective of polygamous worms who communicate via pheromones and live deep under the surface of an alien planet.

Fiction

The Price Of Progress

by David Partington

Water thundered over the falls, plummeting nearly two hundred feet into the Niagara Gorge below—but so far as three oblivious teens were concerned, it needn’t have bothered.

“They’d rather stare at the little rectangles in their hands,” said Alexander to his elderly aunt Charlotte.

“It’s like they’re transfixed,” said Charlotte.

The falls were soon out of sight as the zeppelin, bound for Toronto, set out across the open water of Lake Ontario. With the scenery no longer of interest, most passengers now retired to the spacious indoor cabin where drinks were being served, leaving the three teens to read their paperback books in peace. Removing his top hat—it was 1902—Alexander led his Aunt Charlotte to a table amid much chatter and clinking of glasses.

Neither had ever been higher than a six-story building, and both were of an age that harbored doubts about anything new. Had the price of tickets not been so attractive, they would doubtless have taken a ferry.

No sooner were they seated than a fresh-faced young woman in a sailor dress stepped up to their table and introduced herself. “Good afternoon. My name is Alice. Would either of you like something to drink?”

For an unchaperoned female to provide her given name to complete strangers seemed rather forward—and her question was downright impertinent.

“Well, of all the nerve!” snapped Charlotte.

Realizing that the woman was taking orders, Alexander gave a bark of nervous laughter, then asked for two glasses of Madeira.

As soon as Alice turned to leave, Charlotte remarked on the blue-and-white sailor dress she was wearing. “I suppose it’s good for business to have her sashaying around in that get-up. With no corset and no padding about the hips or posterior, it doesn’t leave much to the imagination.”

Alexander held up his monocle to get a better look as she walked away. “It’s au naturel, as they say.”

The two travelers, dressed in classic black, now shifted their attention to their fellow passengers.

“Look at those lost souls,” said Charlotteof a couple in their late forties standing with drinks in their hands. “His mustache looks like something that washed up on a beach.”

“Fellows like that are usually wholesalers or card sharks,” said Alexander with assurance.

“And look at his lady friend. No—don’t look!” But it was too late; they’d been caught staring. “Oh, dear, now they’re looking at us.”

“Ye gods—they’re coming over.”

The couple—a Mr. and Mrs. Powell—asked Alexander and Charlotte if they could join them.

Alexander glanced sideways at his aunt. “We’d be delighted,” he said, standing up and giving Mr. Powell a hearty handshake. They sat down with their drinks, and pleasantries were exchanged. Though the Powells were significantly younger than him, Alexander tried to keep an open mind regarding their character.

“I gather the young miss has taken your order,” said Mrs. Powell. She looked across the cabin at Alice and scowled. “Her little sailor hat may go with the dress, but does she have to wear it at such a provocative angle?”

“She’s a saucy little minx,” agreed Alexander.

“And what about the young fop she’s talking to,” said Mr. Powell. “Talk about moral decay!”

The fop in question swizzled a stick in his lime rickey and gazed into Alice’s eyes as they spoke.

“What’s he trying to prove with that sports coat?” demanded Charlotte. “If those stripes aren’t a desperate bid for attention, I don’t know what is. Surely, she can’t find him attractive.”

The young man reached for Alice’s hand, but she yanked it away and, picking up her tray, returned to work.

“I’d wear a sports coat like that,” said Mr. Powell.He paused before adding, “If I were a raving lunatic.”

“Maybe he’s dressed like that for a daguerreotype,” said Charlotte. The Powells looked at her blankly. “You know—a photograph.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Alexander.

“Of course,” Charlotte went on, “In my day, we didn’t have photographs. We made drawings and used our memories.”

“Good exercise for the mind,” said Mrs. Powell, leaning back so Alice could place two small glasses of Madeira on their table.

“Oh, but once there were photographs, the young people changed,” said Charlotte. “I saw it happen! Suddenly, all they cared about was showing off for the camera. I recall one young gentleman who, not content with gallivanting around in a high collar, had himself photographed and then allowed his likeness to be published in a newspaper!”

“Without considering the fact that no respectable firm would ever hire a dandy,” said Alexander.

“Tell that to Mr. Striped-Sports-Coat over there,” said Mr. Powell. “The only goal of these people is to shock. And, of course, once their picture appears in the newspaper, it’s out there in the world.” He stretched out his arms for emphasis. “There’s no taking it back.”

“And as for the young ladies,” said Charlotte in a hushed voice, looking from side to side, “many of them know no better than to be photographed with the painted lips and eyes of a Jezebel.”

“Thereby ruining any chance of making a good match,” put in Mrs. Powell.

“Of course, this youthful fascination with newspapers isn’t limited to pictures,” Charlotte continued. “They all want to be mentioned in the society column too—as if it were a badge of honor.”

“Everyone caught up in the ‘social whirl,’ as it were,”said Mr. Powell, lifting his glass with his pinky finger extended.

“They all believe they should be famous; that’s the problem,” said Alexander. “Every nincompoop who invents a new dance step wants to be hailed as the next Edison or Graham Bell.”

“Now, don’t get me started on the telephone!” said Charlotte, setting her glass down sharply.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Mrs. Powell. “Nowadays, whole families sit around the dining room table in silence, just waiting for the infernal bell to ring so they can talk to somebody else.”

Mr. Powell’s eyes blazed. “People embrace all these new inventions without thinking through the consequences. I heard of a minister who was in the middle of a sermon when he had to excuse himself to answer a call from a man selling farm machinery.”

“Lord have mercy,” said Charlotte, clasping a hand to her bosom.

“But that isn’t the worst of it,” said Alexander. “Every year, they publish all the telephone numbers in a ‘directory’ so that every shady character in town can see your name, number, and street address. They’re keeping track of your every move.”

“I suppose the young people feel the need to advertise to their friends that they have the latest gadget,” said Mrs. Powell.

“Yes,” said Alexander, “but they fail to consider that a burglar can simply call the numbers in the directory until they find someone who’s not at home, then they can go over to their house and steal their belongings!”

Stepping up with a tray, Alice collected their empty glasses and informed them that the zeppelin was now approaching Toronto. Thanks to a favorable tailwind, the arrival would be slightly ahead of schedule.

The foursome went back outside to admire the view from the deck along with the rest of the passengers—except for the three teens who, having spent the entire trip outside engrossed in their books, now hurried into the quiet cabin to continue reading.

At first, Toronto was just a thin line on the horizon, only distinguished by a few belching smokestacks. But within minutes, passengers were flying two hundred feet above the city’s sparkling harbor, where sailboats and ferries bobbed.

“I suppose those ships will be the last of their kind,” sighed Mr. Powell. “It’s the end of sea travel as we know it.”

“All the captains will have to learn to fly zeppelins,” said Alexander, peering over the brass railing.

“They’ll probably drain the lakes,” said Mrs. Powell. “Keeping them filled would be a waste.”

After passing over a smelly brewery, some factories, and a tangled web of train tracks, the zeppelin cut its engines and drifted in silence toward a mooring mast high atop the Allied Air Travel building.

Once docking was complete, a gangplank was let down, and passengers began to disembark onto the roof.

The base of the building opened out onto a bustling street, where tickets and souvenirs could be bought. Alexander and Charlotte stepped into the throng with the Powells and other travelers, everyone talking and milling about, as Hansom cabs with sleek, black horses began to arrive.

“Altogether, not a bad experience,” said Mr. Powell, checking his pocket watch with satisfaction.

Mrs. Powell appeared resigned. “Like it or not, air travel is going to be part and parcel of this new century.”

‘”Madam,” began Alexander, halting in his tracks for dramatic effect. “This ‘new century’—the so-called ‘twentieth’—isn’t a proper century like those in the past. It’s a sham, slapped together with paper and glue. Amusing enough for children, perhaps, but not suitable for long-term use.”

As he spoke, people coming out of the building’s revolving doors were trying to get past him.

“Well, we can’t stand in the way—” said Charlotte, tugging at Alexander’s arm.

“Stand in the way of progress? I have nothing against progress per se,” said Alexander, raising a forefinger as he struck a note of caution,” but for every step we take forward, there is something we leave behind.”

“And what’s being left behind is you,old man,” said the man in the striped sports coat, shouldering past him with a suitcase.

Alexander adjusted his top hat with dignity as he glared at the departing figure.

The insolent young man now marched up to the information desk, declaring loudly that he needed to speak on a telephone. “My wife is coming to pick me up in our motorcar,” he said, surveying the crowd with a smug grin.

“Of course, sir,” said the attendant, reaching under the counter and pulling out the apparatus. A minute later, an operator had connected the young man with his wife.

“Snookums, it’s Reggie. Got here a tad early. Tailwind or some such thingamy.Anyhoo, you need to get a wiggle on and come to the station… What’s that?” Bystanders couldn’t help but listen in as he received some bad news. “Blast!” he said at length, putting the receiver back on the hook with fury in his eyes.” Can’t a fellow leave his house for even ten hours?” He began pacing and muttering under his breath, his characteristic swagger having dissipated.

As more cabs arrived, Alexander and Charlotte walked toward them, passing on their way the three teens from their flight—who were now riveted by a rack of postcards featuring photographs of Niagara Falls.

Just as the pair climbed into a carriage, the Powells rushed up.

“Did you hear?” asked Mrs. Powell breathlessly. “The man with the striped sports coat; apparently his motorcar was stolen while his wife was out walking the dog!”

“Not just the motorcar,” added Mr. Powell, “the whole house was ransacked.”

“Well, of course it was,” said Alexander with satisfaction. Looking over at Mr. Striped-Sports-Coat, he smiled and tipped his hat. “I mean, what do these people expect?”

~

Bio:

David Partington is an omnivorous mammal, most active during daylight hours. His work has been published in Bacopa Literary Review, Jake, Power Cut, The Literary Hatchet, Ruth and Anne’s Guide to Time Travel, and elsewhere.

Philosophy Note:

A short story about progress (both technological and social) and how people have been wringing their hands, perhaps needlessly, over the same concerns for over a century.

Fiction

Broken Windows

by Nicholas Diehl

The Window Man

I was a window man for thirty years. Right out of high school, my daddy got me in at the justice building in Abilene. He said it was a good paying job and I wasn’t going to get nothing better, not with my brains. He was a hard bastard sometimes, but I can’t exactly say he was wrong. Eight years in Abilene and then I went to the big justice building in Houston.

In the big cities they’ve got window men working shifts around the clock. I worked nights to start, installing on the first floor. It was hard work, hard on your back. Glass is a lot heavier than most people think.

With an experienced team, guys who’ve worked together for a while, you can get a new window in in fifteen minutes. It’s not like you’re installing windows in a home. You don’t weather seal, it doesn’t have to be perfect. They’re just going to break it in the morning.

I was mostly on the first floor. I heard one time that ninety percent of the windows are on the first floor, which makes sense. First, most crimes are minor, and second, because everybody pleads down to a lower floor if they can. I mean, why take a chance?

The punishment is always defenestration. What really matters is the floor.

#

The Defenestrator

When I meet somebody, I tell them I work at the justice building. That’s what I’ve got on my dating profile. All my social media. Nobody guesses that I ’m a defenestrator. It makes sense when you think about it–everybody’s seen black-and-white photographs of the old-time defenestrators. Everybody’s read The Defenestrator in the Rye. Lots of people think that defenestrators all look like weightlifters or something.

They see a 5 foot 2 blonde girl and guess I’m a court reporter. A typist. I don’t mind. I just smile but I’m totally cracking up inside.

I wear a mecha suit. All the defenestrators wear mecha suits—I defenestrate three or four people every hour, you know. It just wouldn’t be possible to do it the old-fashioned way. We’d never keep up.

I like my job. I’m on the first floor. I wouldn’t want to be higher up. On the first floor, you don’t really have to worry. You’re serving the justice system, of course, but you’re also helping people get through their sentence. They’re mostly good people who just made a mistake. People are anxious, so I talk to them for a minute, try to help them calm down and fall safely—cover your head and remember to roll. I’ve had people I defenestrated send me thank-you notes later. It’s kind of funny.

Strangest thing I’ve ever seen? Definitely the party in the private room. You know there’s a private room where they don’t allow reporters, right? Just the defenestrator and the guilty person and whoever they bring with them. Sometimes that’s part of the plea bargain, the private room, sometimes a person rents it. So this one time I was the defenestrator for the private room, and the guy was an investment banker or something. Fraud, embezzlement, I don’t know. He stole millions of dollars. So he’s in the private room with champagne and strippers. He tried to give me a bottle of champagne, but I told him I couldn’t accept it. Professional ethics.

#

The Student

I’m completely opposed to defenestration. They say it’s fair. “Everyone is treated the same.” “Equal justice under the law.” Bullshit.

I didn’t used to think that. I was defenestrated when I was eighteen. I don’t know—I’m kind of ashamed of it now, even though lots of kids do it. You know, day before your eighteenth birthday, you do something illegal. Not, like, harmful, you don’t hurt anybody or anything. You moon the police station or spray some graffiti or some stupid thing. You get arrested but you get sentenced as a minor. So first floor. Helmet, padded suit, landing mat. There’s a class where they teach you how to fall. It was like a game or, like, a joke.

What opened my eyes was when I took a class on law and society. The system is basically designed to discriminate. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. Then they give the police stop-and-frisk powers, and who do you think is five times more likely to get defenestrated on higher floors? It’s racism when you look behind the curtain.

And if you have enough money, you can get a good lawyer and, like, pretty much guarantee a plea bargain down to one of the lower floors. It’s a for-profit system. Money for the lawyers, money for the politicians. Money for the companies that make the windows. It’s so corrupt.

#

The Paramedic

I’ve been a paramedic for the high window yard in Memphis for a little over a year now, but I’m getting out just as soon as I can. I fill out applications for other jobs every day just about. It’s terrible. Just… terrible.

Have you ever seen someone get thrown out of a tenth-floor window? Seen what happens when they hit the ground? I have. I don’t watch anymore. I just wait for the sound and then get out there, try to save them.

When I started here, my partner told me you have to put everything aside—turn your feelings off. They just get in the way. That’s not a person out there—just a body that needs to be fixed. Be like a mechanic fixing a car. It’s the only way to stay sane when you do this job, because you patch these people up, they might live, but they aren’t ever going to be the same again. Not physically and not mentally.

We have 5% of the world’s population—but we’ve got 25% of the world’s disabled population, because we keep throwing people through windows. I just can’t see how that’s smart.

The worst thing is the faces of the double breakers. You can’t look at them–the hopelessness, the emptiness. The double breakers—you know, the ones with two or more sentences to serve consecutively. It’s so … I’m fixing this guy up, but it doesn’t matter what I do. They’re going to throw him out of the fifth-floor window again tomorrow.

#

The Press Secretary

Senator Colman is proud of his record on crime. He’s a law-and-order candidate, with an A+ rating from the National Union of Defenestrators. And it will be a cold day south of heaven when Senator Colman starts coddling criminals. We need tough laws to handle the big problems—the problems that Governor Arroyo can’t seem to fix.

The senator categorically rejects these baseless insinuations—perhaps the governor is bought and paid for by lawless criminals. Yes, Senator Colman has received campaign contributions from companies in the glass manufacturing industries. He has also received campaign donations from thousands of hard-working citizens who love this country and want to keep it safe. What the governor is calling ‘Big Glass’ is, in fact, your neighbor… your cousin… your childhood friend. The glass manufacturers of America are America.

~

Bio:

Nicholas Diehl was born in Detroit, attended Michigan State University (B.A. in mathematics and history) and UC Davis (Ph.D. in philosophy), and teaches philosophy at Sacramento City College. He has published essays on narration, satire, and the relationship of narrative to philosophical practice in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and fiction in Daily Science Fiction, MetaStellar, and previously in Sci Phi Journal. An extremely photogenic corgi lives in his house.

Philosophy Note:

“Broken Windows” presents an alternate society where the only legal punishment is defenestration, told through the statements of some of the people involved with the system. It is a short satire of the prison system of the United States of our world, which runs for-profit prisons and houses 25% of the world’s incarcerated people. In my work as a philosopher of art, I have written about the mechanics of satire and argued that satire is as close as kin to philosophy, if not always kind. Analogical reasoning helps us identify the target of the satire; a good satire has a bit of moral bite to it.

Sci Phi Journal

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